Perfect Liars Read online

  ‘I should totally style you,’ said Lila, pulling the wardrobe door open and running her fingers over the fabrics. ‘For tonight, I mean. Is this carpet new? It’s insane, it’s the softest thing I’ve ever felt.’

  It was new. And the walls were newly painted, a soft, chalky grey which was apparently made from real shells. The room was perfect. The only reason she had let Lila come upstairs with her was because she loved walking into Charlie’s and her bedroom and seeing the high ceilings and cream wood through someone else’s eyes. It was like a hotel room.

  Keeping her back to Lila, shielding her torso, Georgia peeled off her dress and tossed it on the bed, telling herself for the thousandth time that no, the bed wasn’t too big for the room. Charlie still thought it was, even after Georgia and the woman who’d designed it had explained that it wasn’t. When Charlie and Georgia had first got together they had slept in her single bed, in a shared house in Fulham, because his parents wouldn’t let them share a room in their house. She’d believed at the time that his parents disapproved of sex before marriage. She knew now that it was her they disapproved of. If Charlie had been sticking it to someone with the ‘right’ background, they’d probably have offered up their own bed. None of that had mattered back then, though.

  They would tangle their limbs around each other and somehow manage to sleep soundly in the tiny space. These days he got home so late that he had perfected the art of slipping into bed long after she had fallen asleep. Or at least, when he thought she was asleep.

  There had been a time when she would have forced herself to stay awake, drinking coffee and sitting on the sofa watching reruns of Friends until he got home. But she had learned eventually that he didn’t want that. After a day of talking and shouting and arguing at work, he had used all of his words up, while she had used barely any of hers. Her desk was by the door of the office, so Georgia was first to greet anyone who arrived, but then everyone sat downstairs. Sometimes she would hear a roar of laughter from the basement and consider asking what was happening, but she knew from experience that by the time she made it downstairs everyone would have stopped laughing and no one would want to explain the joke.

  After Charlie proposed, Georgia had seized her chance. The others had been asking for years why she wasn’t auditioning any more and when she was going to start doing plays again. Now she had an excuse.

  ‘I’m happy at Greenlowe for now,’ she had told them, knowing that Nancy was just jealous because, well, who would have guessed it would be Georgia who got married first? ‘I like it there,’ she had lied. ‘Anyway, soon there’ll be babies. There’s no point trying to get into a play or a film and then having to drop out because I’m pregnant. Actresses don’t get maternity leave, you know.’

  Nancy had made a face, implying that the position of office administrator at Greenlowe, a boutique estate agency, was below Georgia, as if working there somehow tarnished Nancy by association. It wasn’t as if it had been Georgia’s dream, either.

  There was no baby. Not yet, at least. And Nancy had been right, as she always was. Georgia was bored. Painfully bored. So bored that she’d volunteered for charities, and redone rooms of the house which didn’t need decorating.

  ‘I don’t really need styling,’ she called across to Lila, who had disappeared into the walk-in wardrobe and was running her hands over Georgia’s clothes.

  ‘How do you keep it so tidy in here?’ Lila laughed. She had her glass of wine in her hand. If she spilt it, she’d soak the carpet, and probably stain something expensive and cashmere at the same time.

  ‘I don’t know. I just do. Honestly, you don’t need to do that, I’ve already picked a dress.’

  Lila was pulling things off hangers and throwing them over the crook of her arm. ‘You’re not being fun. You used to love getting dressed. Remember the wardrobe at school?’

  Of course she remembered it. They’d pooled all their clothes into one huge wardrobe – back then they’d all been the same tiny dress size – and shared everything. Even their uniforms were interchangeable. Georgia had hated it. Every garment she had chosen with her mother over the holidays, carefully sourced from charity shops, bought with money that was desperately needed elsewhere, would come back stretched, or shrunk or stained or burned with a cigarette hole. Lila and Nancy would wrinkle their noses at the labels in the back of Georgia’s clothes and then borrow them anyway, filling the garments with themselves and, unused to the idea of valuing things, not being grateful for them or taking care of them, tainting them. They wouldn’t be Georgia’s any more. Like everything else in her world, they would be split three ways.

  ‘Georgia doesn’t like sharing,’ Nancy would smirk whenever she tentatively suggested that they each have a few special items which were off limits. ‘It’s because she doesn’t have sisters.’

  ‘You don’t have sisters either!’ Georgia had retorted, her voice a bit higher than she had intended. ‘You don’t have any siblings at all.’

  ‘That’s different,’ Nancy had said, clearly feeling no obligation to explain why. Which was Nancy’s way, then and now. Except on this occasion. This time it was Georgia who had emailed Nancy, who had told her she needed to come home: It’s bad. I’m worried. I think you should come.

  And Nancy had, for the first time in her entire life, done as she was told. Lila would kill Georgia if she found out what she’d done, what tonight was really about.

  Lila emerged from the cupboard and threw the pile of silky fabrics, assorted shades of white, cream, taupe and beige, on to the bed. ‘Gee?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  Georgia’s stomach tilted. Lila had been asking for weeks, and Georgia had promised her that tonight they would finally talk, knowing that if she didn’t there was a good chance Lila would text at the last minute with some flimsy excuse and Nancy’s trip would be wasted. Nancy would be furious and disappear back to Boston, leaving Georgia with the entire mess still at her feet. Georgia had done everything she could to avoid having the conversation, short of putting her hands over her ears and screaming. Nancy was so nearly here to help, to deal with it together.

  ‘We can. But I need to get dressed and shower first, OK?’

  Lila looked disappointed. ‘Please?’

  Georgia picked up a silk dress and a fine knit jumper from the bed, and held them together. ‘I was thinking I’d wear these?’

  Lila was like a child. Distracting her was easier than it should have been. Her eyes widened in horror at the terrible combination Georgia had made. ‘You can’t do that! See? This is why you need me to style you.’

  Georgia sighed inwardly, thinking of the neat printed J. Crew dress hanging in the wardrobe, which she had bought earlier in the week, expressly to wear tonight. The dress Nancy would have coveted.

  ‘You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Please will you pick me something?’

  THEN

  Lila

  ‘Lila, please. Turn it down. Just a bit,’ said Clarissa.

  ‘My car, my rules,’ Lila laughed, turning the dial again, so that Rihanna’s voice drowned out the complaints. Her stepmother hadn’t wanted to let her drive back to school, but as ever Lila had won the argument. ‘That’s why we bought her a car,’ her father had reasoned over their last supper the night before, sealing the deal and making sure that Clarissa didn’t stand a chance. Lila almost felt bad for her. She was clearly determined not to be a cliché, favouring Lila over her own children, desperate to avoid the label ‘wicked stepmother’.

  Lila swerved sharply into the drive, forgetting to indicate. She watched in her peripheral vision as Clarissa opened her mouth to complain and then seemed to think better of it. One of her hands was clinging to the handle above the car door, and the other was braced against the dashboard. If Lila accelerated hard and then did an emergency stop, Clarissa would probably break her arm. Tempting.

  The car was the biggest perk of being old for her year. Driving up to the
boarding house would make everyone else painfully jealous. Lila smiled sweetly at Clarissa and then took both hands off the wheel, feeling around for the button which would send the car’s top down. Just as she put her hands back on the wheel, a battered green Volvo turned the corner and narrowly avoided Lila by swerving on to the grass. This was clearly too much for Clarissa, whose hand shot across the car. ‘Camilla! You have to keep your hands on the wheel at all times. Both of them.’

  Lila laughed, and put her hands on the wheel as the roof gave way to sky. Clarissa was full-naming her, it was sort of sweet how she tried to exert authority.

  They were nearly at the top of the drive now, endless as it seemed. Lila suddenly remembered Nancy’s theory that the drive was there to discourage anyone from trying to escape – it would be hours before you managed to walk from your boarding house to the road, and by the time you got there you’d have lost the will to live. But for Lila, driving over the gravel gave her a feeling of warmth, of coming home.

  The hills, the fields, the lacrosse pitch, the tennis courts, the cluster of honey-coloured buildings. It was all the same, identical to how it had been two months ago when she’d gone home for the summer. The only difference was that when she had left in July it had felt tired, and now everything felt new. The air was cooler, all the clothes in her trunk still had the labels in, and there was a sense of potential in the air. Everything was ready to start again. New bedroom, new books, old friends. New, but old. School was trustworthy like that.

  After an entire summer at home in the tall townhouse her father had filled with his new wife and new babies, she wanted her own territory back. She reached forward to press skip on the iPod, determined to pull up outside Reynolds House with the perfect soundtrack.

  The car rasped against a speed bump, which she had accidentally accelerated into while playing with the sound system.

  ‘Camilla, please. You focus on the driving and I’ll sort the music.’

  Lila sniggered. As if! In fairness, Clarissa wasn’t old, old. She was thirty-six, which was the perfect age for a stepmother because she wasn’t quite young enough to know how to talk to Lila, but she was so much younger than her dad or her mum had been, and she hated the idea of seeming old. Of all the clichés she tried to avoid, she failed at escaping this one. If Clarissa ever tried to meddle, all it took was a question from Lila about what it was like to grow up in the sixties to put her back in her place.

  Clarissa needed to calm down. She was overreacting to every tiny driving mistake. Anyway, in twenty minutes she’d be in a nice air-conditioned car back to London where she could hang out with her real kids and forget that Lila even existed.

  ‘Gee!’ Lila squealed, jumping out of the car and slamming the door, the engine still running. Standing outside Reynolds House, perfectly framed by the wide yellow door, was Georgia. She wore a pair of navy tracksuit bottoms, rolled down at the waistband so that her tanned hip bones were on show, and a tiny white vest top. Her hair was blonder than ever, and her wrists were covered in bracelets.

  Lila wrapped her arms around Georgia and they jumped up and down. Her chest felt tight and full, fizzing with the excitement of seeing her best friend again. Lila noted the streak of orange fake tan on Georgia’s wrist. She tried not to think about how much it must suck to have spent an entire summer holiday in England. She and Nancy had already resolved not to say a single word about their week in Portugal together. And to keep pretending they believed the reason Georgia hadn’t come was because she had a ‘family wedding’, when they both knew it was because her parents couldn’t afford the flights.

  ‘Who else is here?’ asked Lila, looking around.

  ‘Hardly anyone,’ replied Georgia. ‘I was first back.’ Then, squealing, she pulled Lila into a hug. ‘It’s so good to see you!”

  ‘Anyone would think you two hadn’t seen each other for years,’ came Clarissa’s voice. She was dragging the bags out of the back of the Audi. Georgia glanced over and finally noticed the car. She looked at it, then back at Lila, cocking her head to one side.

  ‘No!’

  Lila tried not to grin. She didn’t want to be that girl, but she’d clocked the new cars in the boarding house’s car park, and she had definitely done the best so far.

  ‘A convertible Audi?’ Georgia was smiling broadly now.

  ‘Yep.’

  Georgia ran towards the car and climbed over the closed door into the passenger seat. ‘You bitch. You actual bitch. How?’

  ‘She has a very indulgent father,’ Clarissa called, while dragging one of Lila’s bags towards the door of Reynolds House. ‘Who loves her very much.’

  Georgia turned her mega-watt grin on Lila’s stepmother. ‘I wish my parents loved me this much!’ Then she turned back to Lila. That was the good thing about Georgia. She never seemed to get jealous, even though she never had anything new or nice.

  ‘When did you get here?’ asked Lila, pulling the straps of her vest top down. No harm in trying to get a bit more tanned before the sun disappeared.

  ‘Like, five minutes ago.’

  ‘Where’s your mum?’ called Clarissa from the door of their boarding house. ‘I was hoping to say hi.’

  ‘She just left,’ said Georgia, flushing. ‘She wanted to stay, but she had to head back – she’s got work.’

  ‘I hope it wasn’t her Lila nearly ran off the road on the way in!’ laughed Clarissa. ‘Which one’s their car?’

  ‘Clarissa, can you sign me in please?’ Lila called across the drive. She turned to Georgia. ‘Did Nance message you?’

  ‘Yep. She’s going to be back late. She said not to pick beds until she gets here.’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Have you checked the dorm list?’

  ‘Not yet, I waited for you. But Cookie promised.’

  ‘I know. Imagine if she went back on it? It’s the only three-person dorm in the whole house, and this entire term will be ruined if we’re not together.’

  ‘We’re the only trio in the house. It’s ours, always has been.’

  ‘Girls? Are you coming in?’ came Clarissa’s shout. Lila sighed theatrically.

  ‘Stop,’ said Georgia. ‘She’s not that bad.’

  ‘Why are you so obsessed with her?’

  ‘I’m not, I just don’t hate her like you do.’ Georgia twisted her hair up into a bun.

  ‘I don’t hate her. She’s fine.’

  ‘But she’s not your mum.’

  Lila bristled. This wasn’t a place that Georgia usually went to. It wasn’t somewhere she was welcome. Just like Lila didn’t ask about Georgia’s mum’s job, or comment on her hand-me-down uniform. ‘No. She’s not.’

  ‘You know she’s pregnant?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One hundred per cent. That’s why he got you the car. Wait a couple of months. You’ll see.’

  Georgia stood up in the car, and climbed back over the door. ‘Let me give you a hand, Clarissa, you shouldn’t be carrying that,’ she simpered.

  Lila tipped her head back and stared at the sky. For fuck’s sake! Georgia was right, of course. That was why Clarissa had been so whiny on the drive down, and why her father had held her so weirdly tight when he’d said goodbye to her the night before. Of fucking course. Another one. They’d already popped out two kids who put their sticky hands on everything and made the whole house smell like mashed fruit. Did they really need another one? He was nearly fifty. Wouldn’t he be embarrassed, doing the school run with a bald patch and wrinkles?

  She pulled her biggest suitcase from the back seat of the car, where she’d wedged it earlier. She’d have to drag it up the stairs herself now, Clarissa wasn’t in any state to help.

  When she had started at Fairbridge Hall six years ago, they’d made a day of it. Her, her dad, her mum. They’d booked into a hotel the night before and raised a toast to her new school life. They’d made plans about what they’d do on her first weekend trip home. That morning her m
other had blow-dried Lila’s hair and let her wear mascara for the first time.

  Her dad had dragged everything up the stairs to her dorm, and her mum had helped her decorate, sticking posters and pages from magazines that they’d carefully selected together on the walls. Everyone had thought her mum was cool because she’d left them with a box of Haribo and Freddos, and when she’d dropped her handbag she’d said fuck really loudly. Later, when Lila was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep on the strange mattress, she’d put her hand under the pillow and felt her mum’s mascara there.

  With these thoughts, the feeling – the bad feeling – was starting to come back, with its familiar burn in the back of her throat. That wasn’t for now.

  ‘Do you want to go up the back stairs, or the front ones?’ Lila called, surveying her pile of stuff, splayed over the carpet of the entrance hall. ‘I think this suitcase might get stuck on the back ones. Why isn’t there a lift in this place?’

  Georgia didn’t respond.

  ‘Gee? What’s wrong?’

  ‘You need to come and look at this,’ said Georgia quietly. Her eyes were cast down. ‘The allocations.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Georgia looked like she was about to say someone was dead. Panic started to well inside Lila. Surely not? It wasn’t possible. Everything had been arranged. It had practically been promised.

  ‘The triple dorm?’ Lila asked. ‘You’re fucking joking?’

  The noticeboard was pimpled with holes where pins had been. Next week it would be covered in notes about auditions and practices and matches. For now it was naked but for a huge piece of white paper with the dorm allocations.